TELEMETRY TO BLENDER ANIMATION SCRIPT

Not content with the level of animation that comes out of most car rigs addons such as Rig-a-Car for Blender, Chaos for Unreal, or UAC for Maya to name a few; I wanted to find my own solution to bring realistic car animations to Blender. 

Telemetry data is used in motorsports to aid in car setup and driver coaching, however we can use this data to essentially reverse engineer car dynamics and animate it within blender. The telemetry data itself can come from real cars given there's enough data collected, or in this case from sim racing games which output telemetry data for simracers to use to develop their own setups and for driver comparisons/coaching. 

With the modding capabilities of Assetto Corsa or rFactor, one can create a mesh to drive on, or a specific car to drive using the game's respective pipelines provided. After driving within the sim, we can output the telemetry to use for our script. The car within Blender is rigged with empties parented to each other. The script declares variables for which empties are to be animated, as well as stating arrays for each of the data channels we need from telemetry.

The script then appends data from the telemetry to each of the arrays. We then setup a for loop that takes into account the Hz of the telemetry data, and will increment in subframes if necessary. The loop applies transformation keyframes to the respective empties each iteration. Keyframed transformations includes data of GPS location/coordinates, chassis pitch, chassis roll, chassis yaw rate, steering angle, toe angle, suspension travel, wheel speed, brake position, speed, and more.

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Data that is not from telemetry is also used. Such as static kingpin angle, caster angle, and camber angle which determines camber change when the steering changes. Camber change under bump and droop is also taken into account. Camber change rate based off suspension travel is measured, so within the script the value of suspension travel at the given time is multiplied by that measured rate to determine bump/droop camber. Active aero as seen on the Pagani Huayra BC can also be achieved with the data available using a function based off yaw rate, speed, and braking pressure.